Mirror matches should never happen. There should be a batch of heroes that are picked for offence and defence.
Junk is a defence hero, he should be picked more than others in this situation.
He is neither picked for offence or defence, Soldier and Genji are picked for both, this is a problem and a result of bad balance.
Your argument doesn’t stack up either on the professional scene. One team tried a bastion strat, it fell on its face, hard, and was never seen again. Some heroes were simply never played, in any niche. But there is no niche in brawl TDM in my opinion.
tbf, OWL played OW2 as if were OW1 without one tank. 1-2 Months aren’t appropriate time to come with any kind of “new strategy” on “pro” level. Blizzard reworked and changed several stuff in a small timeframe. Take OG ana introduction by example, took around 3-6months to folks realize that she was OP. It is a fair assumption that OWL are playing OW2 as their “safe” spot which means mirrors being common. At same time they don’t know much info. If you account: new maps, hero changes, 5v5 composition and play as team 1-2months it is a joke time to tackle all the things. Most likely OWL played safe and used the heroes they were more “familiar” and tried more solid compositions with 2-4 kind of strategies at best.
ana is a hard character if youre having to deal with flankers and the like, but its easy to maintain performance in lower ranks just by shooting in the tanks butts and nano’ing at the right time, ana’s skill floor is way overhyped
but saying she’s not a difficult character is wrong, her skill ceiling is high and the amount of time you need to master her is one of the ones that makes her deserving of her kit, which even despite this strength of a difficult character, she still nets low winrates both looking at unmirrored and unfiltered data
bronze she has nearly equal pickrates to mercy and moira, mercy and moira have a near equal winrate, ana doesn’t and has a lower one despite this power you speak, because the players down there don’t have the skill to make full use of it, she’s a character that gets stronger as you get stronger but stays around average as you climb despite this
So when certain heroes (that you like) are popular, they are “generalists”.
When other heroes (that you don’t like) go from trash picks into something a bit more popular, they are OP. You want them to go back to where they “belong”, in the “niche” category.
Jesus christ if you simply can’t recognize just how problematic that view is, I don’t see any point in going on with this discussion.
mirrors in OWL in general are common, because OWL players want to win, they don’t want to experiment unless its provably good and even better, most OWL metas don’t start in the OWL it starts in contenders, where they’re trying to find new ways to get recognized for their skill in the game, even one of the most well known and hated metas started there by the GOATs team which is where GOATs got its name
I have come from World of warcraft, as the same as many folks here. we love Blizzard. We do NOT want to see the game crash like WoW did and lose a whole bunch of players.
The adventures, stories, characters and experiences are what make Blizzard special. But there are big issues that have to be addressed.
First and foremost being Match maker.
If you need a profit driven approach. Do not sacrifice the Experience of the game for pushing players into Alternative account purchases. I would much rather see you sell 1 dollar cosmetics and put that wonderful art team of yours to work. They do an AMAZING job. They are some of thee most talented people for game designers this day in age!
The Current Activision match making system does not build a FUN, Fair or inclusive match making system that drives the spirit of Blizzard or Overwatch as of right now. I would heavily FOCUS on Quickplay, Quickplay Classic and Competitive. So it is fixed here, and begins to pave the grounds to Overwatch 2 to come in and be widely accepted in the world again. Not as a paraiah . But as THEE game that originally pulled Blizzard back out of the Dark ages when it became a Fallen Company right after Wrath of the Lich King closed its last chapter.
Argent Tournament grounds is what patch hurt the game, and ultimately put Blizzard into a recession. The fans are here. We are starving for Blizzard. But we have to think of Blizzard as our Brother and Sister game company again. That it once was.
If Match maker is not handled first and foremost. This game’s story ends. Not as a tale of success. but a Tragedy.
Yep, while counters are the best option on ideal scenario. They often stick to mirror matches because it is easier to stick with jack-all-trades who would work on most scenarios and wouldn’t add too much complexity on their viable strategies and the amount of strategies they could play. Considering the limited time for them to come up with strategies and adapt to the changes was really expected to them to play as mirror and rarely playing outside their safezone.
They tried some stuff, but those stuff often were related to heroes they could “rely on it” they often stick with heroes that the players have skills on it and can work well together.
At same time Contenders are more a test case for it for sure, OWL it is more conservative on that aspect.
Incidentally, one of the easiest ways to increase OWL composition diversity would be to reset all players Ult charge to zero whenever a point is captured. Which means both teams get the chance to swap their composition, without suffering a severe Ult economy penalty.
Could even hide each team’s visibility into the enemy player composition for #sec or until they become visible to the other team.
He is a good fellow. Always bring some useful stuff to the discussion even if we don’t agree on everything he always are up to debate stuff.
Just some food for though. What if they implement on OW2 one hero per match? I’m not talking about the mirrored match or winrate itself, which would be affected by that change at some degree. But the impact of those niche heroes, like symmetra. Maybe could direct overwatch to be more niche oriented heroes and split the playerbase more evenly on heroes. It seens natural to have several heroes and most of them being played regularly. I could go one step further and say, why not hero select system inside of the match by first come first served or just alternate picks, like in a draft system instead of role queue with longer queues on certain roles. Could tackle some main heroes which are often the source of mirror matches.
Nice detailed update. But I would not focus on unmirrored winrates for heroes like Sym to much. Why? Because Sym is so unpopular that only people play her in her peak scenarios or are more efficient with her that with any other hero that inflate her “usefulness” for like the other 99% of the player. Sym looks strong but also just because Sym master play her and she is useless for anyone else.
Pickrate should have more a waight here but I think they kind of now what they are doing… but I really hope they dont just balance round the excel sheet because there are some games that do this and they breaking apart.
How do the “fun to play” and “fun to play against” metrics fit in to all of this? Like, playing against Orisa is not fun and what do you plan on doing about this? Is it even on your radar?
LOL, we considered almost the same theme at almost the same time.
Could work, at same time, why not simply impose one hero per match? Supposedly all heroes should have at least 1-3 counters. If you go further on the cast, often you will see 3 heroes (one in each role) who would counter an individual hero.
That is a interesting take, I even suggested something like that on Scoreboard system during the match. Your team shouldn’t have the info about enemy team healing, damage, kills and so on. Could be more useful to have more data from your teammates like, ability cooldowns (not only ultimates), their damage blocked and overall assist on kills, one of the coolest cards on OW1 it is about “offensive assists” by example followed by “death prevented from immortality field” and transcedence healing from zen. Those kind of stuff could have a metric on their own league in game to your team see. How much “critical saves”, “offensive participation” and “utility” supports and even other roles gave to the team, like a well timely bodyblock/barrier from tank. I love when I put a bubble as winston to protect my team against d.va mech explosion by example.
While the current scoreboard could be used at end of the match, I think a scoreboard based on a teamwise during the match would be more useful. That would make folks theorycraft and analyze who are the backbone of the opposite team, while the current data already hints some issues on the opposite side I think that having that kind of information without much effort defeat a bit of the purpose critical thinking and analyzing during the match.
The one that goes above 50%.